Father Payne eBook

“It is rather muddling,” said Father
Payne, “but, in a general way, the point is
this. When pose is a deliberate attempt to deceive
other people for your own credit, it is detestable.
But when it is merely harmless drama, to add to the
interest of life and to retain your own self-respect,
it’s an amiable foible, and need not be discouraged.
The real question is whether it is assumed seriously,
or whether it is all a sort of joke. We all like
to play our little games, and I find it very easy to
forgive a person who enjoys dressing up, so to speak,
and making remarks in character. Come, I’ll
confess my sins in public. If I meet a stranger
in the roads, I rather like to be thought a bluff
and hearty English squire, striding about my broad
acres. I prefer that to being thought a retired
crammer, a dominie who keeps a school and calls it
an academy, as Lord Auchinleck said of Johnson.
But if I pretended in this house to be a kind of abbot,
and glided about in a cassock with a gold cross round
my neck, conferring a benediction on everyone, and
then retired to my room to read a French novel and
to drink whisky-and-soda, that would be a very unpleasant
pose indeed!”

We all implored Father Payne to adopt it, and he said
he would give it his serious consideration.

LXV

OF REVENANTS

I was sitting in the garden one evening in summer
with Father Payne and Barthrop. Barthrop was
going off next day to Oxford, and was trying to persuade
Father Payne to come too.

“No,” he said, “I simply couldn’t!
Oxford is the city east of the sun and west of the
moon—­like as a dream when one awaketh!
I don’t hold with indulging fruitless sentiment,
particularly about the past.”

“But isn’t it rather a pity?” said
Barthrop. “After all, most emotions are
useless, if you come to that! Why should you cut
yourself off from a place you are so fond of, and
which is quite the most beautiful place in England
too? Isn’t it rather—­well,—­weak?”

“Yes,” said Father Payne, “it’s
weak, no doubt! That is to say, if I were differently
made, more hard-hearted, more sure of myself, I should
go, and I should enjoy myself, and moon about, and
bore you to death with old stories about the chimes
at midnight—­everybody would be a dear old
boy or a good old soul, and I should hand out tips,
and get perfectly maudlin in the evenings over a glass
of claret. That’s the normal thing, no
doubt—­that’s what a noble-minded man
in a novel of Thackeray’s would do!”

“Well,” said Barthrop, “you know
best—­but I expect that if you did take
the plunge and go there, you would find yourself quite
at ease.”

“I might,” said Father Payne; “but
then I also might not—­and I prefer not
to risk it. You see, it would be merely wallowing
in sentiment—­and I don’t approve
of sentiment. I want my emotions to live with,
not to bathe in!”